While there are plenty of cozy farming games coming out at a constant clip these days, My Time at Sandrock has been the one I’ve kept my eye on for a while now. Pathea Games’ previous title My Time At Portia seemed promising, but didn’t ever grip me. With this follow-up, though, the team has not only done a lot to improve on the solid foundation established by their last game, but they’ve also created a unique world, visually and mechanically, that sets My Time at Sandrock apart from so many other cozy farming games.
Plenty of these games whisk you away to a gorgeous meadow-y town full of trees and flowers, but not My Time at Sandrock. Instead, you find yourself moving into the rugged, desert town of Sandrock – a community with a strange meld of modern technology and rustic roots. 330 years ago, something called the Day of Calamity struck and destroyed most modern technology – leaving you in the present, post-apocalyptic day as an aspiring Builder here to help Sandrock flourish.
Despite the incredibly ominous backdrop of the world, My Time at Sandrock is an incredibly chill and heart-warming game. A lot of that endearing charm comes from the impressively fleshed out nature of the town itself – there are dozens and dozens of unique NPCs with their own voices, quirks, appearances and interests – over 40 of them can be befriended, and a couple dozen of them are even potential romance options. Every character being so unique and real helped add such a meaningful layer of importance to your duties – whether it’s a side quest to gather materials or a main quest to track down a mysterious bandit or fix a broken bridge, the characters involved are always the townsfolk you spend your day-to-day bonding with, making you really feel the effect your actions have on Sandrock.
You’ll be doing everything from harvesting natural materials, to building and customizing a home, to processing raw items into usable ones, fighting monsters, exploring dungeons, and doing plenty of cooking and seasonal mini-games. A lot of these actions have a fun twist put on them thanks to the setting, though – naturally growing trees and water are a rare commodity in Sandrock, and water is what fuels all of your technology and equipment. Learning how to harvest wood when you can’t cut down trees like in every other game is a fun challenge in the early hours of the game – and by the time you’re 70 hours in, your water-fueled machine empire will be so, so impressive.
My Time at Sandrock has multiplayer support if you’d like to rebuild the wasteland with friends, but it comes in the form of an entirely separate campaign. In this mode, many of the main structures and buildings from Sandrock are missing – with the goal for you and your friends being to build up all of those yourselves, alongside your own cozy homes. I appreciated that friends could pop in and out of my co-op world, even when I wasn’t online and hosting a session. The flexibility of the mode and the significant differences from the main singleplayer campaign made it really rewarding to hop back and forth between the two modes.
My Time at Sandrock isn’t without issues – there are some annoying graphical pop-ins, dungeons are pretty basic and barebones, and a few character models get into a slightly creepy porcelain doll territory. They’re ultimately minor issues, though, when the entire package is so endlessly endearing and rich with things to do, characters to bond with, and items to collect. For the farm sim enthusiast looking for something that isn’t just more of the same, My Time at Sandrock is a must-play.
